We are discussing this via a digital medium. To a certain extent, that
will force a certain amount of digital photography to be used.
Specifically, if we want to share our images with the hundreds (how many
current members are there? George?) of members of this list, the only
practical method requires a digital version of the image. So some
discussion of digital matters is a necessary evil.
Over all, the digital discussions tend to be short lived. (The "what
kind of scanner should I get?" and "Does xyz ink process make good B&W
inkjet prints?" threads don't last much more than a week, usually.) With
proper subject lines they can be skipped by those not interested.
I have no access to a darkroom. I wish I did. (I practically lived in
the darkroom during college, in the mid 1970s...) As a result, the
digital darkroom is my only alternative. I am not yet happy with my
current scanning and printing hardware, so I don't use it for PRINTING
my pinhole shots (which are mostly on Polaroid). I use scanning to share
pinhole images, though.
Mike Vande Bunt
I Zarkov wrote:
Lisa has expressed exactly my apprehensions about what I read here
daily about the marriage of the digital with the pinhole. I began
doing pinhole 12 years ago because I was already at that point
disgusted with the critical discourse that was then emerging as to how
digital imagery would replace film and what the inherent nature of the
photographic art was, if indeed there is such a thing as an 'inherent'
nature of this process of image making.
There seem to be multiple issues implicit within this discussion: the
nature of the recording matrix, film vs. hard drives & memory sticks,
the medium of display: paper vs. cathode ray tubes; the capture
device: lenses vs pinhole; as well as ink vs light sensitive salts,
photons vs 0's & 1's, Pythagoreans vs Neo-Platonists [well, maybe]
alchemists vs. positivists.
While I understand entirely the allure that the digital choice offers,
I've never been able to shake the feeling that the prime reason for my
doing pinhole work was to restore the 'aura' to the photographic print
that Walter Benjamin says was lost to photography in his essay "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" There is nothing
about using digital media that reinvests the print with that sense of
the unique that chemical image making allows, especially when one is
involved with elaborate bleaching and toning 'post-processing' of the
print.
I feel that the fundamental difference between digital and wet
photography has more to do with our understanding of and complicity
with time in the art-making process more than the media of
reproduction and that digital manipulation of images further subverts
a correspondence relationship between an external world and what is
presented as a photographic truth.
The conundrum to all of this discussion is that this
dialogue/disagreement would not be possible without our computers,
networks, CRT's or plasma screens and software galore. It's too darn
hard to throw a 'sabot' into the CD-ROM drive.
Peter
'Down, Photoshop, down. BAD dogma!'
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